Eldritch, like any respectable Lovecraftian tale, begins in a library. The library is vast, stretching outward and upward to a ridiculous degree. Yet despite its size, the library manages to feel quite claustrophobic, especially once I’ve realized it primarily seemed to hold thousands upon thousands of copies of the same four books.

It isn’t a normal library, of course, serving more as a hub world for the three colorful tomes that lie at the library’s heart. Each of the glimmering books transports me to a bizarre sort of nightmare realm, full of monsters, traps, and madness.

This is Eldritch, a first-person dungeon spelunker from the two-man team at Minor Key Games.

Eldritch wears its rogue-like inspirations on its sleeve, embracing the subgenre’s penchant for permadeath and randomization. Inside each magic book is a randomly generated voxel dungeon matching the theme of its patron Elder God, from Dagon’s swamp to Nyarlathotep’s more Middle-Eastern ruins. Your goal is simply to survive and escape each book world, in the process descending through multiple dungeon stages to reach the Elder God soul that can open a portal back to the library.

The randomly generated dungeons work well as an analog for the non-Euclidean geometry of which Lovecraft was so fond, and many of the wall textures have an exceptional quality that makes the flat cubes appear warped to drive home the effect. Rooms don’t always fit together properly either, often appearing as if two completely separate locations had been jammed together. It’s jarring, but purposefully so in order to reinforce the otherworldliness of the locations.

The dungeons also have a remarkable verticality to them that is fairly rare among first-person games. Even traversing between rooms on the same floor often means finding a hole to fall down through in order to climb back up on the other side. Throughout the three book worlds, progress is always downward, forcing you to leave the relative safety of elevated platforms where most enemies cannot reach.

While the randomly generated levels establish an unsettling tone, it’s through sound design that Eldritch excels, equal parts brilliant and sadistic. While trying to make my way through the dungeons, I was constantly bombarded by the moaning and footsteps of what seemed to be practically every enemy in the level. There is no sound muffling for enemies that are farther away, or on the far sides of walls, or on completely different floors, for that matter, creating a deeply unnerving atmosphere.

Imagine that while lying in bed, you look up and see a spider slowly descending toward you. You quickly jump out of bed, and by the time you look around, the spider is nowhere to be seen. You know it’s still there, somewhere, probably hiding in the folds of your sheets by now, but you can’t see it anywhere. That’s what playing Eldritch is like.

Hearing every enemy simultaneously is like knowing the spider is there but not being able to see it. A Deep One might walk through a door several rooms away, yet the sound would be so close that I’d frantically spin around, expecting the monster to be immediately behind me.

The effect is compounded by the fact that some enemy types don’t get along, killing each other without any provocation on my part. Each enemy has a distinct sound when it spots prey, and it is deeply unsettling to never know for sure whether it is me or some other beast that is in the crosshairs.

HorrorScope is a recurring feature exploring the horror genre in gaming and drawing attention to its elements, its tropes, and its lesser-known but still scary titles.

Rogue-like is a game genre term that has come back into vogue in a big way with the explosion of the indie game scene in the last few years, and quite a few of those rogue-likes are providing templates for strong, satisfying, and scary horror games.

Rogue-likes are titles that include elements of the game Rogue, like randomly generated levels and unforgiving difficulty. Permadeath permeates the genre — when you die, you lose all forward progress and have to start over. It’s this addition to the rogue-like genre that makes it especially conducive to horror, because the stakes are about as high as a game can make them. Battles are tense and scary, because if you die, you lose everything you’ve gained.

Eldritch is one such horror game. It’s skeleton consists of rogue-like elements, and they help it to achieve some genuine scares and tension that aren’t attendant to the usual horror tropes of monsters leaping from closets and game worlds awash in gore. It takes rogue-like ideas and applies them to a first-person shooter, with graphics reminiscent of classics like Return to Castle Wolfenstein. Permadeath is Eldritch’s scariest feature, as the game sends players delving into deep dungeons filled with unknown horrors.

Inspired by the writings of H.P. Lovecraft, Eldritch takes place in a library, where players are tasked with finding and gathering three lost souls. Each soul is hidden in a magic book, and activating a book transports the player to a multi-level dungeon. Those dungeons are all procedurally generated, making it impossible to know precisely what they hold or how to navigate your way through them.

Add to that the fact that the dungeons are teeming with enemies, and that you’re made to enter those dungeons virtually defenseless.

Especially in the early moments of an Eldritch run, your head will need to be on a swivel and your senses honed. Entering each dungeon is a fraught affair because you’ve got little you can bring with you. You can only carry two weapons at a time, and that includes things like a revolver, a knife, throwable glass bottles or rocks, and dynamite. There are only a few items in the library proper that can be taken, and the only weapons available for each start are a few of the bottles. Whatever other weapons you might use for self-defense must be discovered within the dungeons themselves.

Listening for, identifying and finding nearby enemies before they find you is key to survival as you enter the dungeons, because the procedural generation means nothing is guaranteed — not even a safe place to enter each area.

The vertical nature of Eldritch also helps make it a treacherous place. You’re constantly descending, and often must work through rooms on one level to find a way down to the next. It also means it’s possible for enemies to attack from places you don’t always see, and a lack of peripheral vision because of the constraints of the first-person view also make the Lovecraft-inspired dungeons feel all the more claustrophobic.